Once you’ve built a great looking application, you’ll likely want to provide equally great looking icons and toolbar bitmaps. Unfortunately, the bitmap editing tools included in Visual Studio are far from state-of-the-art. They haven’t been updated for a long time and simply don’t provide a rich set of tools for designing quality images.
Another problem is lack support for building standard Vista icons. Given the increases in monitor resolution, Vista introduced a new standard size for icons: 256x256. As icons of this size consume a lot of disc space, the images utilize PNG compression. The tools included in Visual Studio have no ability to create these types of icons.
To help resolve this issue, Microsoft turned to Axialis Software. Axialis is the creator of IconWorkshop 6.2 which is an award winning icon design package. In fact, IconWorkshop 6.2 is used by many teams within Microsoft to build icons for our shipping products.
Axialis responded by creating IconWorkshop Lite. IconWorkshop Lite is a free graphics tool that retains the power of the professional product. Using IconWorkshop Lite you can easily create professional looking icons and toolbar bitmaps for your application. Better still, it integrates directly into Visual Studio 2008.
IconWorkshop Lite provides the following features:
· Powerful icon editing and color management tools (including color/alpha channel adjustment and filter support)
· Ability to edit images in toolbar filmstrips (bitmap containing several images for toolbars)
· Support for all Windows icon formats up to Windows Vista 256x256 with PNG compression
· Support for a wide variety of image formats – BMP, PNG, JPEG, JPEG2000, GIF, TIFF, TGA and more
· Creation of an icon from existing images
· Creation of new icon formats from existing ones
· Ability to use image objects (overlapping layers) to create icons
· Ability to manage a library of icons or images in addition to individual ICO files
· Integration into Visual Studio 2008
IconWorkshop Lite is available for download to any Visual Studio 2008 Standard or above customer. The download can be found at: http://www.axialis.com/download/iwlite.html
We highly recommend you give it a try!
- Visual C++ Development Team
PingBack from http://www.easycoded.com/iconworkshop-lite-now-available-for-download
Good move, free extensions are always good. Though you should have picked RealWorld Graphics instead of Axialis, their icon editor has a couple of killer features for Vista icons, like the projected shadow, and much more advanced raster editor.
For anyone looking for an alternative icon editor, I recommend IcoFX by Attila Kovrig.
http://icofx.ro
I'm not affiliated with the author, just a happy user. It doesn't integrate with Visual Studio but I don't see that as a drawback. And best of all: the full version is available at no cost.
s'about time. The Visual Studio icon editor is an embarassment. Would be nice if they integrated with VS2005 too (we're still using that since the Xbox360 team hasn't upgraded, slackers that they are).
Very nice vs add-on, and real time saver... more of helpful things like that would be grate... here a little list, as example:
- [Versioning Controlled Build]http://www.codeproject.com/KB/macros/versioningcontrolledbuild.aspx
- [Refactor!™ for C++]http://www.devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/RefactorCPP/
- [SlickEdit Gadgets] http://www.slickedit.com/content/view/441
- [Visual Leak Detector] http://dmoulding.googlepages.com/vld
Over the last few days, Microsoft has released a whole slew of new developer-related bits for the world
My latest in a series of the weekly, or more often, summary of interesting links I come across related to Visual Studio. The Visual C++ Team blog has a post about IconWorkshop Lite , which is available as a free download. Greg Duncan posted a link to
Any chance that we'll get a decent cursor editor as well?
http://www.axialis.com/axcursors/
It is not working with Visual Studio 2008 Professional SP1. It doesn't recognize it and does not even install. :(
just wanted to see what it does
Installed and integrated with my Visual Studio Standard SP1
install will not recognize vs 2008 pro sp1 if you use a activated trial version...
Hello,
A new version 6.3.1.1 is available online. It installs fine on activated trial versions of Visual Studio 2008.
Regards,
Marc EMILE - Axialis Team
I tried to install version 6.3.1.1 and it definitely does not install or recognizes VS 2008 Profesional if you use an activated trial version with SP1 installed. If you are going to release a product and then tell everyone it works and is fixed... It better well work.